Tiana Coudray and the lovely Ringwood Magister are making their second trip overseas in their young career together, this time to compete in the Luhmuhlen CIC3*, June 15th to 19th. Tiana has kindly offered to keep Eventing Nation posted on their travels and the competition. For more information on Tiana and her program, please visit her website. Thanks for writing this Tiana and thank you for reading.
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From Tiana:
Greetings from Germany,
We arrived Wednesday morning into Amsterdam after a very easy flight from New York. Kelly, Nat, and I then spent the next 4 hours or so drinking coffee and telling stories to keep ourselves awake while we waited for the horses to be cleared through customs. After a little mishap when a lorry tire met a curb, a bit of joking around that us girls would be happy to change it so that they didn’t have to call a repair man, them calling the repair man anyway, and then it taking 3 men a lot of standing around scratching their heads, we eventually had a new tire on the lorry. It was nearly noon when we set out for a “6 hour” drive across Holland and Germany. I can’t say much about the drive as I was looking at the insides of my eyelids most of the time, but I can say that this country’s restrictions that truck drivers must stop and rest every few hours was getting to be more than a bit tedious. If we had that in America, it would take me a week to drive across the country!
We finally arrived in Luhmuhlen Wednesday night and got the horses settled into a nice stable where we’re staying until the event next week. By the time we went to check in to the hotel and try to find dinner it was 10:00. The hotel staff informed us they were closed and only agreed to give us a room after we begged a little. Then we walked into town where the only food we could find was a Chinese restaurant. In a scene that was a little like an I love Lucy episode, we attempted to crack a double language barrier to order some food. As the proprietors barely spoke German and not a bit of English, they eventually brought a menu that had a few clip-art pictures of animals so we could figure what the words for beef, chicken, pork, and fish were. We were still stumped with one, and through some demonstrations of animal sounds, we eventually figured it was duck. It’s a good thing the place was empty because the quacking and flapping our arms at the table would have definitely turned some heads. We ended up with an excellent dinner and headed to bed.
Thursday we took it real easy on the horses, hand grazing them and organizing our tack for most of the day. We went to a tack store on site that was floor to ceiling, packed denser than anything I’ve ever been to. It was really impressive, but I managed to leave without buying anything. Kelly and I walked into town and found some real necessities; carrots and apples for the horses, and cookies and chocolate for ourselves. Now we’re ready to take Germany by storm! Jennie arrived in the afternoon and then we had a really nice dinner with a lot less gesturing and noise making. Today we’ll give the horses an easy hacking day to stretch out their legs and then start to ramp things up later in the weekend.
